#exithere

The second best part of fucking her was the way her scent would leak into my skin and stay with me the rest of the day…It’s been five years but I remember every line on her hand and every freckle on her nose and every direction the muscles on her thighs moved when I pressed my fingers against them, pressing until she moaned and until she whispered those magic words over and over again…I’m yours, she says…I’m yours, yours, yours…I remember exactly how her teeth felt, carving into my lower lip as I’d pull back slightly while we kissed, my skin stretched and clasped and punctured from the sharp edges of bone she brushed and flossed four times a day…

when I was seventeen me and Harriet would do coke off the black hardcover book of Edgar Allen Poe’s complete works and wonder to one another if Kurt Cobain really killed himself or if Courtney had him killed…the blow came from this 27 year old bartender my 19 year old sister was sleeping with while her boyfriend was in Ecuador for a year doing missionary work…Harriet was super cute and her tits were nice and she had these handcuffs she found in her aunt’s bedroom and stole one afternoon and she would let me lock her up wherever I wanted too and do what I wanted which usually ended up being whatever I saw happening in the porno movies we always watched why we were doing it and when we weren’t doing it…me and her, we watched a lot of porn together that spring…the summer before, after Harriet’s grandma died and her mom and dad separated and she all of the sudden hated being around either of them as they tried peeling away those twenty years of comfort and normal with trendy haircuts just like the ones made famous by primetime sitcom stars and gender friendly social clubs that convened one night a week with vague dreams of inflatable passion and a second chance at doing something so interesting that someone might ask them about it one day or acquaintances from town might talk about it without them being present…on the hottest day in four years in the middle of that August, stuck on her father’s farm and unable to get a hold of me to drive to her and save her from a kind of fierce boredom which only blossom’s that ugly in the middle of nowhere, years before the internet and during a time when satellite cable dishes were just starting to surface in places still too rural for paved roads, Harriet tried to order a pair of silk pajamas and the red nighty Nikki Taylor was barely wearing from Victoria Secrets over the phone but the voice on the other end hung up after Harriet finally admitted she only had a two dollar bill and a Bazooka Joe comic strip in the pocket of a pair of shorts that were in a duffel bag in her father’s car so she threw a rock from the driveway as hard as she could at the television in the kitchen then drank a fifth of Southern Comfort as she listened to Pulp on her headphones and cut her wrists after lighting a hundred candles in the bathroom…

Even though I can remember the specific places on her back that would make her gasp and her body dance when my fingers crossed them, tracing her sweet, honey skin while we laid in her bed after fucking and even though I can remember exactly how hard and far inside of her pussy to slide my fingers to make her eyes roll all the way back inside her head, I couldn’t tell you her middle name if you asked me and I don’t remember the names of her brothers or sisters or where she was born since it was different than where she moved here from…I’m scared of getting to a place where dinner out becomes something planned, something we only do on Saturday night, I’m scared of existing in a place where long bouts of silence fill the space between questions about how our days were and a story about the copy machine at work…What is it about us that makes us seek our eventual misery, that makes us chase our own confinement…What is it about us that that’s so eager to stop exploring and discovering and experiencing…

When Harriet was 20, she called me and told me she was pregnant, she told me she didn’t know what to do, she told me she loved the guy who banged her into motherhood…He’d once been a star football player in high school who dreamed of fall Saturday’s in a stadium and 70,000 people cheering for him…His last dreams…The one that never came true…Harriet once dreamed of California and London, she once dreamed of being so far away from home that she’d forget she ever lived there…

On Facebook and Twitter, the details of the new war are plastered all over my timelines…Blistering words that drip with anger as me and the rest of their friends are treated to a front row seat of the 21st Centuries new theater-the social media breakup-I watch all this so-called stability and security unravel into a lose thread of deceit, days without any passion, late nights with a missing person, and the confirmation that the last few years were nothing more than a huge mistake…instead of I love you, it’s you’re a whore, it’s you’re a motherfucker, it’s you don’t fuck me anymore, and it’s you guys were right the whole time…When she walked out of my door that last time five years ago, I felt alright about everything, I even felt relief…In my mouth was the final strand of her hair that would ever get stuck in it…I tasted it then slowly pulled it out and inhaled her scent a final time…It’s better this way, it really is…I’d rather miss you than hate you, I’d rather remember the laughing and fucking than the lying and the screaming…

A year ago, on Harriet’s daughter’s 12th birthday, she told me she wouldn’t do anything differently, she said she wouldn’t trade this life for any other life…I didn’t believe her but I understood that’s what you’re supposed to say, I understand the willingness to accept when the only other option is misery…And I hung up the phone and grabbed a beer from the fridge and walked out on my back deck just in time to watch the sun set beneath the golden gate bridge…

Sloan sat next to a window in first class. She was on her way home to San Francisco that morning for a three week Christmas break. Before the plane was in the air, before it even began boarding, Sloan was all buzzed from the two shots of brown and the two beers she drank at a bar in JFK that she bought with her fake.

           Sloan had also snorted half a white Xanax bar and by the time the plane was speeding down the runway toward the gray New York sky, all the lingering anxiety created in the aftermath of a night rolling on cut Molly had dissolved from her head and her spine and her shoulders. She was feeling more like, “neutral”, about the trip, even the length of it, than she had at any point up until then so that was a really good thing for her. She was actually proud of it as she drank a glass of white wine and put her headphones on and listened to Smith Westerns.

           Her first taste of New York pussy came in September following an after party in a Williamsburgh loft after seeing them play earlier that night. Her name was Jackie and she was twenty-three and absolutely stunning that evening with her soft black hair hanging straight down the middle of her back, as her dark Venezuelan skin grew moist and shiny from the sweat pushing out of her while she danced alone in the center of the room to an Allah-Las song, a chalice filled with red wine clutched in her hand, her black Chanel cashmere halter top draping loosely off of her and hanging just past her tiny leopard print skirt.

           Sloan had come to the party with a date. A sophomore boy at Columbia majoring in literature who was very handsome and very nice but bored the shit out of her, making him very expendable without any wrenching of the gut.

           It was around three in the morning when that Beach Fossils song, “Sometimes”, began playing from the bedroom Sloan had been hanging out in for over an hour, shot gunning huge slopes of Molly and cocaine. She wanted to dance and she wanted all the girls and boys to watch so she emerged from the room with a bottle of champagne and made her way to the middle of the loft.

           Someone decided to play an LCD Soundsystem record and Sloan’s body immersed itself to the sound accordingly. She wore her hair up that night and had shaved down the left side of it earlier that week. A thousand compliments a day ensued too. That night, she’d wanted to be the sexiest and best dressed doll at the rock show. She was wearing a white chrochet net mini dress with a plain black tank top underneath it that barely touched the top of those lovely thighs of hers. A pair of awesome, knee high, black leather Chanel boots covered the bottom half of her legs. Around her neck hung a Tiffany’s cross double pendant in titanium and sterling silver, a gift from her father, Gerry during a shopping spree at the end of August.

           It wasn’t very long at all until Jackie and Sloan had sought one another out amid the dense crowd of beautiful strangers smeared blue and gold with smiles while bopping their precious, lovely heads to the transducive beats and rhythm of one of the best American bands ever.

           Sloan touched first that night.

           After spending the entirety of “Dance Yrself Clean” with only inches separating them, with neither girl blinking and both of them refusing to look anywhere else until they absolutely had to turn away like a couple of brave, naïve children staring at the sun until their eyes are scorched, Sloan stepped past this South American queen and brushed her forearm with her fingers as she walked toward the bathroom.

           She’d never been kissed like that before.

           With such purpose and intensity and passion.

           Jackie hadn’t bothered to lock the door after she followed Sloan inside. Her lips would stick to Sloan’s neck for seconds at a time while her tongue slid across Sloan’s skin, which she thought tasted like peaches and gumdrops. Then right before Sloan dropped her tight ass onto the wobbly sink, she reached for her crotch and yanked her underwear off, stuffing them into Jackie’s mouth. Once she was comfortable, she pulled the bottom of her dress up.

           Jackie’s tongue felt like a damp paint brush making precise and confident brush strokes on the sensitive insides of her legs. Sloan moaned and squeezed any part of Jackie she could find when her hands weren’t curled into fists. The second that tongue touched pussy, a tiny pleasure shout escaped from Sloan’s throat. Goosebumps covered her legs and every single hair on her neck, every last strand on her arms and back stood up as an index finger gently drove up Sloan’s pussy.

           Unfortunately for the girls though, their glass house of hedonism was smashed into crystal ashes when the door flew open just a moment later and an unconscious dude that Sloan didn’t remember seeing earlier was dragged inside by two other guys and dumped in the bathtub.

           An invisible panic as thick and overwhelming as the New York air in July had already set in and everyone was sweating and scared and ready for some kinda simultaneous, communal, breakdown of the nerves to commence.

           A pretty blonde girl in a black dress who’d handed Sloan the molly mirror less than an hour earlier ran to the tub and dumped two trays of ice on Mister Fucked Up who apparently hadn’t opened his eyes in like ten minutes or maybe it was two.

           As more kids too fucked up to know any better came pushing into the room instead of running away as fucking fast as they could, the idea of calling 911 was debated for maybe like four seconds before it was cut down like the asshole in the tub.

           Cold water poured out of the shower head right after the ice cube fail. Jackie grabbed Sloan’s hand and squeezed it. Sloan looked around the room and realized that nobody fucking cared what may have been happening before this potential felony intrusion occurred.

           A different girl was leaning over and smacking the face of Mister Party Killer as another reality challenged debate broke out about who tried checking his pulse first, what room they’d found him in, and if anyone remembered hearing the supposed pulse checker say anything, fucking anything at all, about their findings.

           And no one had.

           It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

           Specific facts lose their meaning really fast in those dying moments because of the honesty they carry with them. Nobody wants that fucking shit. Nobody wants more honesty after they’ve just been brought to their knees with spectacular brutality and are suddenly living through the most sobering and honest time of their checkered lives.

           And there were at least three baggies of blast being passed around and then another tray of ice cubes was launched and most of it missed the tub entirely somehow.

           “We have to go now,” Jackie whispered while Sloan stared at Mister Amateur all messy and helpless and dying too probably.

           It was the third body to sear those gorgeous Sloan Marcus eyes all up close like that in the last ten years and she was still surprised at the consistency and breathtaking power of death’s awfulness and simplicity.

           “Hey,” Jackie went. “Yo.” She snapped her fingers in front of Sloan’s eyes. “Come on, girl. I’m going right now.”

           Sloan’s eyes didn’t move though. She didn’t even flinch. She’d found another sun in this room somehow.

           “Whatever,” said Jackie, letting go of Sloan’s hand.

           And this is when everything changed again that night.

           Sloan’s sweaty palm landed against the side of her leg and the heat left her body. She shivered. Two different girls began wildly shaking Mister Suck right then and they screamed at him too.

           Sloan finally blinked.

           She felt the bright and heavy lights of somewhere popping even though nothing above her had flickered or even breathed.

           She turned her neck just as Jackie was whipping past her.

           “Wait,” she said, grabbing onto the Latin queens arm. “I’m coming with you.”

           “Yes,” said Jackie. “Come on now.”

           When Sloan began to turn towards the door, she noticed her panties were sitting in the sink.

           While more ice was being thrown around that room along with a continual flow of horrible ideas, Sloan reached over and grabbed the soft, expensive black lace. Then she followed her life’s new beautiful stranger out of that room and then out of that loft eventually, once she found her purse in a room she didn’t remember being in at all.

           And if it hadn’t been for the assumed dead boy’s ex-girlfriend arriving at the loft maybe five minutes before his eyes tried shutting for good and he went down, prolly Jackie’s snatch wouldn’t have been Sloan’s first New York taste since neither girl felt particularly sexual anymore and visions of curling up alone in her bed danced like lovely princess angels through Sloan’s head.

           See, as it turned out, Mister Close Call was a diabetic who’d drank way too much beer and was too drunk to remember to stab his skin at any point that evening with the life needle in his pocket.

           While Sloan was walking out of that mystery room and covering her shoulders with a black cardigan, a young kid’s ex-girlfriend cut through the thick and sweaty walls of bullshit and selfishness and fear and administered a dose of penicillin which began the journey of bringing him back to the danger side where all the beating and pulsing hearts still stay.

           People cheered and talked as if they’d given the shot to the boy they’d chucked ice cubes at just a minute earlier. A demand and an even a line for selfies with the glorious couple who now shared an unintended bond stronger than any of the ones they’d formed once upon a time ago with empty sex, shitty coke, and quiet dinners at restaurants they couldn’t really afford to eat at, became the new energy of the room for like twenty minutes.